The Moderate Voice occasionally runs Guest Voice posts by readers who don’t have a weblog or have one and have something special to say here. Guest Voice posts do not necessarily reflect the opinion of TMV or its co-bloggers — but they do add to our free-wheeling debate.
This is the first part of a three part essay by one of our readers and frequent commentors, poet/writer Dan Schneider. The second part will be run tomorrow.
Plagiarism, Clichés, Influence, And Google
By Dan Schneider
© 2006 by Dan Schneider
In recent years the state of literature has been in manifest decline for a variety of reasons. Instead of seeking to ameliorate the situation, the people who run the publishing industry have exacerbated the decline with increased cronyism, the fostering of -isms and schools of bad writing, the refusal to publish real criticism, and having publishers, editors, agents, and critics refusing to do their jobs.
Many bad writers who have benefited from this system have decried it, although always ‘safely’, speaking of ‘unnamed others’ who have ruined things. Never do they ‘name names’ of the offenders- be it bad Postmodern writers like David Foster Wallace, PC hacks like Maya Angelou, plain old bad writers like Richard Russo, or hack genre writers like Dan Brown.
Since I have spent many words in decrying such, I will focus here on some of the recent literary ‘scandals’, since they grab far more public attention than bad writing does.
The most blatant example of this trend was in January of this year, when ‘bad boy’ memoirist James Frey was hauled by his publisher before Oprah Winfrey’s tv audience, and publicly chastened by the Queen Of All Hypocrisy for lying in his memoir of drug addiction and other ills. Newspaper columnists and other supposed paragons of ‘truth’ condemned the drug-addled suburban frat boy writer for lying about his life.
I was one of the few and first public voices to condemn the condemnation of Frey as a ‘liar’. My argument was simple.
First, Frey should be condemned, but because he’s an even worse writer than the above named bad writers; not for ‘lying’, since the very classification and genre of ‘memoir’ implicitly acknowledges the gospel’s truth is not being told. Second, memoir is a wholly different creature from autobiography, and the distinction is not arbitrary. A memoir as Edmund Morris’s Dutch, about ex-President Ronald Reagan, finds the author making up events in a far more well known public figure’s life, as well as fictively installing his own made up ‘persona’- years younger than his real self, into Reagan’s life.
Now, say what you will about Reagan, and the success of the venture, but Morris’s book forever severed any claims that the two genres were interchangeable. This actually goes back several centuries, but Morris’s was the first deliberately acknowledged modern memoir to admit its usage of artifice. The best known prior example is Marcel Proust’s memoir Remembrance Of Things Past, which some people term an autobiographical novel. No one calls it autobiography, though, for Proust changed names and his own sexual orientation, as well the sexes of his lovers.
An even greater example was Alex Haley’s Roots, where he plagiarized a fictional novel’s, Harold Courlander’s The African’s, descriptions and passed it off as ‘fact.’ And what to make of Truman Capote’s nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, where it is well known that many ‘facts’ were altered for dramatic effect to increase the titillation factor about a crime whose facts were public record?
What does it say about our society that such a genre even has to exist? If a memoirist has to lie about the names of the people he knows, to forestall nuisance lawsuits from ex-lovers, enemies, and friends who cannot bear to have the facts of their lives dealt with, where does that memoirist become culpable? I’ve learnt this in my life, that no matter how honest a writer is being, he has to change names, because there will always be liars and reprobates who can ‘buy the truth’ via greater financial resources or connections. And, in art, is ‘honesty’ really such a good thing? The very root of the word art comes from the same source as artifice.
In short, art is not reality, and it cannot be, no matter how good a simulacrum. There is a fundamental difference between writing as art and writing as journalism.
Was Frey a good man when he had to change names, dates, and places, to avoid frivolous lawsuits, but bad only because he made the scenes in his book more melodramatic, to increase sales? Were Frey’s claims about spending months in jail, and having oral surgery without anesthesia- both easily provable and manifest lies, somehow more morally culpable than Proust’s shame over his homosexuality or Morris’s far more grandiose fictions, or Haley’s out and out plagiarism? I think not.
The real crime Frey committed, and will be condemned to live down in perpetuity, was being a bad writer, but even that was enabled by ‘the system’ that looks to have shock value replace art as a sales concept. Proust was capable of sterling and great prose, Morris has always been a solid writer, and Haley’s prose- in both Roots and The Autobiography Of Malcolm X (an autobiography criticized for its loose play with ‘facts’, and wholly written by Haley- what does that say?), has moments of searing power and excellence, so I suspect that a great deal of the backlash came from people who knew Frey was bad, but thought that since his book was more in line with the self-help culture of recent years, his ‘lies’ were unforgivable- since the self-help political dogma values ‘truth’ above all else.
Meanwhile, Proust’s being a self-loathing homosexual, Morris being a grand fabulist, or Haley’s being a confessed plagiarist, were mitigated by Proust’s era of sexual repression, Morris’s subject being a life built on public lies in the first place, and Haley’s ability to play the ‘race card’ to ward off detractors.
Yet, the Frey scandal was soon replaced with another literary ‘scandal’ du jour- that of Kaavya Viswanathan, a college aged romance writer, with an exotic Subcontinental background, toiling under the latest brainless ‘genre’ to come along- the chick lit novel.
It didn’t take long for the anger and resentment of many other chick literatistas to ‘out’ Viswanathan as having plagiarized her book, How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, And Got a Life, from another bad chick lit writer’s books, Megan F. McCafferty’s Sloppy Firsts and Second Helpings, to the tune of several dozen very similar passages. Viswanathan took the old standby defense as having merely ‘internalized’ her beloved literary heroine’s words as her own. To a degree, there could be truth to her claim, if there were only a few instances, not dozens, because bad artists are simply not creative.
Viswanathan’s biggest crime, in the long run, however, may have been to have plagiarized very bad writing in the first place. The passages stolen are the trite ramblings of a hack. Viswanathan did nothing to even remotely cover up her theft, not making it better nor different in the least.
Then, it came out that Viswanathan may not have even written the plagiarized passages, and that she was merely a ‘beard’ for a writing mill, Alloy Entertainment, that tries to get its crap published by using ‘fronts’ who do none of the writing, but look good and sexy on dust jacket covers.
A few years back Nell Freudenberger had such claims made about her on countless literary chatrooms, after she rocketed to a mega-book deal after working at a publishing house and showing her writing to a boss. The result was reams of editors working on trite tales of rich young American girls in exotic locales who do nothing of interest. Soon, she is having a novel come out which similarly has been worked over by editors, which only makes one wonder if the reason most of the published works in recent years are so generic is because they have been subjected to the lowest common denominator editing by committee, rather than having a single point of view.
Naturally, plagiarism is an old problem, but it’s one that is not so cut and dried.
As T.S. Eliot, who was accused of plagiarism- and not just for his admitted pastiche in The Waste Land, once said, ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’ Similarly, Hart Crane- the greatest published lyricist of the Twentieth Century, has been accused of plagiarizing the poetry of the relatively unknown Samuel Greenberg. While there is certainly a similarity between some passages of the two, there is no theft, merely ‘influence’, a term I will return to. Other famed poets, like S.T. Coleridge, have similarly been accused. However, poets are hardly alone. Fictionists like Dan Brown have been accused.
Although recently acquitted in a British court of stealing the idea for The Da Vinci Code from two non-fiction writers, Michael Baigent’s and Richard Leigh’s Holy Blood, Holy Grail (as well as further claims he stole from Lewis Perdue’s 1983 novel The Da Vinci Legacy), the fact is that a side by side comparison of texts from his and their book shows similarities every bit as striking, or more so, than that in the Viswanathan case. Not that any of the writing in this case is much better, if at all, than the chick lit writers, but it begs the question of whether or not Brown’s fame and riches simply ‘bought’ him the verdict that a young and unknown writer like Viswanathan could not.
The larger question seems to be, is plagiarism like ‘fair use’? That is the protection in the copyright code that reads:
US Copyright Code Sec. 107. – Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use
Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include:
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.
In essence, if one is writing criticism or satire, one can take the words of another to either enlighten or entertain. Especially in shorter works, like a poem, a whole poem can even be reproduced in a critical piece. Longer prose works are more troubling, for one cannot write a critical analysis of a novel and reproduce the novel’s whole text within.
The Dan Brown case does raise troubling points, for how can one set of very similar writings be declared not ‘actionable’ while another set brings cries of foul play? Was it because Dan Brown admitted he read the prior work, and named them as a ‘source’? Perhaps.
Then what to make of the case of poor Brad Vice? This year he, too, has been through the grinder, after a ‘reworked’ a story of his, Tuscaloosa Knights, was found to have striking similarities to passages from an obscure 1934 nonfiction book, Stars Fell on Alabama, by Carl Carmer.
The fact was that neither his source nor his story was any good, ala Viswanathan and Brown, but unlike them he claimed that the place where the tale appeared had not added his addendum that his tale was an homage to the earlier tale. Of course, one might wonder where any true creative impulse lies in all of this? And if truly an homage, why not quote specifically from the piece, or place the similar passages in italics, a long standing recognition that a work has ‘quotations’?
Was Vice simply bankrupt of story ideas, as well as skill? How close does a given piece of writing have to hew to another to be plagiarism, and not homage, as he claimed? Vice said he used parts of Carmer’s nonfiction work to add ‘authority’ to his fiction, but is such mere excuse making? The book in which his tale appeared, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train, failed to cite Carmer’s work, and Vice’s publisher, the University of Georgia Press, pulped his book. Vice weakly claimed that his doctoral dissertation, which was an earlier draft of the story, did have an epigraph from Carmer’s work, and that the press hypocritically asked him to remove the epigraph to reduce the appearance of influence.
Yet, there is something very fishy about the weakness that Vice’s explanations have garnered, which has only further made him appear guilty.
To be continued tomorrow.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.